gmatusk

I am a fan of Sandahl Bergman, but I gave this a rating of 3. I might have rated it a little higher were it not for the fact that I felt that the makers of this film did a rip-off of the title of the 1935 film and the novel on which it was based. I have no objection to admiring scantily-clad beauties, but I am not entertained by seeing them whipped or tortured. I tend to enjoy campy films, but the campiness in this one often falls flat. There is an unevenness in tone and characterization. The two male protagonists start off as obnoxious macho jerks whose misogynist attitudes, we are somehow expected to believe, are transformed in short order into sympathetic enlightened pro-feminists.

The only review I can offer is based on the fragmentary version I watched on a DVD issued by RetroFlix. Poor picture quality, and nowhere near 70 minutes in length. The title character is called Jack, not Georgie Amberson Minafer as in the novel and in the 1942 Orson Welles film. Jack's childhood scenes (where he is purportedly portrayed by Ben Alexander, who later played Sgt. Friday's partner in the TV series "Dragnet") are absent from this DVD. Jack turns away Mr. Morgan, who is courting Jack's widowed mother Isabel. Isabel does not die of a broken heart in this version --- she is hospitalized due to a tenement fire, from which she is rescued by Mr. Morgan. Jack is also in the same hospital as a result of having been struck by an automobile. If Aunt Fanny is in this movie, she's not in the short fragmentary DVD I watched.

Here's a bit of trivia about the making of this film. The character played by Anthony Edwards is hired to read to the character played by Robert Mitchum, a wealthy recluse who lives in a home with a well- stocked library. The elegant bookcases had to filled with elegantly- bound books, so the film crew asked the Newport Public Library for help in filling the shelves of the bookcases. I worked as an assistant to the cataloger at the library, and I was assigned the task of choosing such books from the books that we had in storage. We had several multi- volume sets with nice uniform bindings. I recall choosing a set of the works of Henry James (who was a regular visitor to Newport in his younger days) along with some other sets by various writers and some individual volumes that would look appropriate for the library of a rich man in the 1920s. John Huston was bed-ridden during the filming and died --- he did not die before filming started. I observed the filming of the parade scene -- I was relatively close behind the camera as it started to move on tracks to follow the parade. I hung around for at least two "takes," maybe three. Lauren Bacall rented movies at a Newport video shop which specialized in classic films (including silents) and foreign films. The name of the video store was Rosebud, and its owner was a film school graduate whose dog was also named Rosebud. I was a patron of the store and was friendly with the owner --- Bacall kept her updated on John Huston's deteriorating condition. Bacall recommended the store to Anthony Edwards and he came in regularly to rent movies --- when the owner told Edwards that she did not have a copy of "Top Gun" (his biggest movie role up to that time) in her store, he laughed. What did I think of the movie? -- as most of the other comments have said, it's a pleasant film -- not a great film, but an appropriately modest adaptation of Thornton Wilder's nostalgic revisiting of the summer he spent in Newport.